“For” is a collection of maximalist dedications to various avant-garde composers who have been influential to me musically. A common throughline of the works of these various composers is how they all pay special attention to details regarding space, texture, and time.

These recordings encapsulate myself exploring the possibilities of multi - layered performances, letting myself be free to manipulate sounds to my heart’s delight, and to spend as much time as needed on the music. This was an approach to music making I haven’t embraced in several years, with my recent explorations focusing on real-time improvisations. It’s nice to get back to my roots in this maximalist style, and I’m realizing how influential my improvisational skills are on my ability to make soundscapes; or more “traditional” ambient music.

This album is essentially a “return to form”, which acts as a progress marker for both my improvisational ability and my production and sound design skills. It also is me reflecting on my own creative process. I find it very hard as a multi - instrumentalist to tie myself down to focusing on one instrument, in fact, my primary instrument, the drums, tend to feature the least in my music, partly to push myself out of my comfort zone and partly due to the difficulty of properly recording drums. For is a return to form in its creation and instrumentation, featuring the drums again, something I haven’t played on a recording since July of last year on COYNTSYF.

I’ve been conflicted since I began making music with categorization, never knowing how to properly describe my music. I began making music that was much more in the vein of traditional ambient music, along the lines of a Brian Eno or Cluster, but that music I made slowly evolved (or devolved, depending on who you ask) into something else. As my musical tastes developed, so did my own creation, and I began to toy around with the concepts of “Noise”, and “Avant - Garde Music”, and “Free Improvisation”.

These labels mean different things, and the music you’ll hear labeled as such will be wildly different from one another but still, all of these terms felt and still feel right when trying to describe my own. Here’s a brief statement I made over a year ago which describes how I felt at the time; as you can see, not much has changed, I’m still back and forth with how to categorize my music, and I’m sure that’s something that will continue for years to come.

“Recently I've begun to toy around with Noise music, in the more traditional sense. I often call my music "Noise" because it's a catch-all term which encompasses a decent amount of my output, but I'm also put off by the term "Noise".

In the European canon of improvisation, you often find improvisers (Derek Bailey, Tony Oxley, Evan Parker, Lol Coxhill) put an emphasis on "sound for sound's sake", possibly taking from Cage or Stockhausen's ideals. I would group myself firmly in the realm of the European cannon, solely based on my fascination with unique sounds. Not to mention that the European cannon is informed by twentieth century classical music, a realm I draw inspiration from too.

However, when looking at the American greats (Coltrane, Ayler, Sanders, Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor) you will find that sound is not viewed the same. All sounds have a soul in the American context, they have a spiritual connotation. Coltrane seemed to liberate sound and form spiritual connections with his solos. Cecil Taylor felt as if his music came from the Earth itself. I also feel aligned with this position. Any human expression is triumphed by that of sound, and the emotional and spiritual connection to my music is certainly the same connection that the greats had.

Yet despite all of this, I'm weary of saying I'm either. Is my music noise? Is it free improvisation? This is something I will have to leave up to fate, maybe one day I will feel certain about what it is I do, but until then, I will continue what I'm doing now.”

The album art for For was done by the amazing Paul Keily, I can’t stress enough how great this art is, thank you Paul.

For also draws on new instrumentation, including the Hulusi, a gourd flute traditionally played in Southern China, Vietnam, and Myanmar.